Kristen Kreider – författare

What does it mean to be governed and what does it mean to resist? Examining how communities form amidst social and political turbulence, this open access book presents four case studies that demonstrate the power of organic social formations over imposed order. Understanding this formation of community in terms of ‘ungovernability’ and a ‘poetics of resistance’,Ungovernable Spaces charts a movement from oppression, through transformation, into imagining, and finally emergence. Throughout the book, the authors engage methods of situated practice and related modes of writing and image-making to consider a range of global case studies: the destruction of the Mecca apartment building in Chicago’s South Side in 1952, following a decade of resistance from the building’s predominantly African American occupants; M.K. Gandhi’s practices of social activism including the Salt March protest of 1930, and the daily practice of spinning and intermittent fasts; the Ciudad Abierta (Open City), a radical pedagogical experiment started by a poet and an architect in Valparaíso, Chile in 1970; and, finally, the urban ecologies developing on either side of Belfast's ‘peace walls’ in the wake of the Troubles and 1998's Good Friday Agreement. Structured via four spatial configurations – the grid, the charkha, the constellation, and the cluster –each case study explores community formation through artistic and aesthetic practices that resist and unsettle forms of hegemonic order. A truly interdisciplinary work at the intersection of poetry, art and spatial practice, Ungovernable Spaces argues for the importance of ethics, aesthetics, imagination and ecology in developing, of necessity, a new poetics of ‘us.’The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI. AHRC Techne Doctoral Training Partnership Award [grant number AH/L503940/1].

How do artworks ‘speak’, and how do we ‘listen’and respond? These questions underlie theinvestigation here of Roni Horn’s Pair ObjectIII: For Two Rooms, Emily Dickinson’s latermanuscripts, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s PassagesPaysages, Fiona Templeton’s Cells of Release andJenny Holzer’s Lustmord. The tenets of criticalperformance, art-writing and site-writinginform the critical method used in Poeticsand Place. Each chapter is dedicated to one ofthese five artworks, and is arranged in orderto fulfil three main objectives: to understandhow the artworks generate meaning through amaterial poetics in relation to place; to developa critical methodology for engaging with them;and to investigate their ethical potential andpolitical imperative. All of this, ultimately,facilitates the development of a triadic relationbetween theoretical concepts of sign, subjectand site at the crossover between poetry,art and spatial practices. This extends eachartwork beyond the dyad of a critical encounterin order to offer – and allow others to grasp– an appreciation of how the artwork figuresmeaningfully, as well as configures meaning,in the wider world of objects and things. Thebook concludes with a discussion of the ethicsof reading from the second person, opening upa debate concerning the role of empathy withincontemporary, politically engaged practices inart and poetry.